Thursday, January 23, 2014

Daily Maverick (Johannesburg) Review

Your ‘to read’
list: Two set texts for all South AfricansAs 2013 bled into 2014, I read two books that
on the surface, had nothing to do with each other. Yet they led me to a
startling realisation that made me think perhaps they should be set reading for
all South Africans. By MARK HEYWOOD.

The idea that children should be educated has
existed for thousands of years. The idea that all
children have a right to a quality education is,
however, a more recent idea, several hundred years old in some European
countries, but only just turning twenty in ours. More recent, too, is the
notion that education has more than just a utilitarian and practical objective.
Education is about sustaining and deepening cultures and about building
communities and nations.

Learning about literature (for a long time
imperiously just called ‘English’) is an essential component of education, long
a stock part of the syllabi. And so it should be. But how much organised
thought, or debate, do we invest in understanding the role that literature can
actually play in nation building or creating capable citizens? How do we
inspire our teachers to teach literature and our learners to receive it? Is
reading to be perceived as an onerous Dickensian chore of plot and quote
learning, or can we make it into a gateway to creating national solidarity,
empathy and social justice?

Two books I read over the holidays made me
rethink these questions.

Every era and most nations have outstanding
novelists and historians - the great writers who capture the spirit of the age,
who labour over the intersections of life, embedding the personal in the
political and vice versa. Great writers don’t lecture. They allow the
accumulation of layers and colours until a picture begins to emerge. The great
novelist or historian is able to portray the tectonic movement of social
forces, the evils caused by some men (for it is usually men), and its impact on
other men, women and children.

And then bang – suddenly a canvas exists
where it all makes sense.

Although there is a tendency to separate
fiction from non-fiction, the definitive history is also a work of art - pieced
together by the meticulous and committed researcher, presumably aware of the
higher end of history. A great work of history is a text that when all the
cloth and button finding is done, sews together something that always was, but
never would be – but for his or her dedication.

In many countries’ literary traditions the
names of the great novelists and historians – or their hybrid, what we might call
histovelists - come quickly to hand: there was Dickens, Tolstoy, Trotsky,
Orwell, E P Thompson, Austen, Fitzgerald and maybe Salinger, Soyinka, Achebe,
Ngugi, Roy and Rushdie... the list goes on and on.

But, surprisingly, one does not easily or
immediately come up with the names of South Africa’s great historical works and
their partners in fiction. Histovelists do not yet form a part of our national
consciousness or indeed character.

Universities and schools still have a task to
identify, excavate, elevate and embed our writers. Perhaps Paton, Schreiner or
Mphalelele; Gordimer or Serote. But who else?

When they do – on the basis of the luxury of
recent reading - I would argue that one little-known novel that must be given
its place is The Lotus People by Aziz Hassim,
first published in 2002. Similarly a ‘history’ that should be recognised as a
definitive account of the struggle era and some of its key actors, is the
recently published Joe Slovo and Ruth First in the
War against Apartheid, by Alan Wieder.

Although very different books, unaware of
each other, they intersect and draw from the same raw material, particularly
the history of dispossession of the last 150 years. And, as with all
histories, they tell us a great deal about our present.

Hassim fictionalises the experience of Indian
people in South Africa and describes the rise and demise of Durban as the port
city that most gave expression to Indian people’s entrepreneurship, creativity
and culture. In the course of a grand narrative that sweeps up 150 years, I
understood how - but for Apartheid and its cruel bureaucratically enforced
decision to reroute and physically relocate the Indian experience in South
Africa - Durban might have evolved as quite a different city.

What has subsequently been made its periphery
may well have been its heart.

The book buzzes with the life of the old
Durban Casbah. It makes the reader want to retrieve maps of the old Durban it
describes (alas, not easily done). But it is in its modest, patient, slowly
created cast of family characters and their friends, and the story of how an
apolitical family largely intent on going about its own business, bore the
nonsensical depredations of Apartheid, that the book’s tragedy and nobility is
found. Through it is possible to rage against the oppressors’ wrong that was
inflicted on a segment of our country’s population. It is a rare book that
after 500 pages maintains a momentum to its last page.

Wieder, by contrast, brings real people back
to life from their fictions, both hagiographic and demonic. Through their own
words he assists Ruth First and Joe Slovo to become real people once more,
rather than cardboard cut-outs made of them in either their demon years, as
depicted by Apartheid, or their angel years, as depicted by comrades. As I
write both remain the subject of appropriation and contest in the battles
raging in the Tripartite ‘Alliance’.

Ostensibly the two books appear quite
different – their only coincidence that I read them as one year slipped into
another.

But actually there is a great deal of
overlap. On one level, the intersection occurs during years in the 1940s and
1950s when Hassim describes the reawakening of the Congress movement in Durban
and its impact on the Suleiman household, its sons in particular. From the vantage
point of their (soon to be no more) home in Verbena Road we encounter a range
of real and imagined-real characters, including Dr Goonum, Fatima Meer, and
others who came from Johannesburg to try to organise and conscientise the
anguish that was being felt by the Indian community as the Ghetto Bill-process
of ejection from their homes and communities gathered force.

Joe Slovo’s great friend and comrade Yusuf
Dadoo makes a brief appearance in Hassim’s novel. Which character, I wonder,
may have been based on Ismail Meer, Ruth First’s first lover?

But on another level the pages of both books
recreate the spirit of age and the outrage that made “mensch” like Slovo and
First into outstanding revolutionaries and catapulted them into a life they
never intended or imagined.

What also links the two books is their
enormous descriptive power. Hassim achieves it by weaving a family story around
the sons and daughters of two nineteenth century émigrés from India, Yahya
Suleiman and Pravin Naran. Wieder achieves it by building into the heart of a
well-known history 77 oral interviews, which capture the anecdote that is the
real stuff of life and the diversity that comes with multiple voices and
memories.

Both books are an emotional roller-coaster.
Anger and outrage at the murder of Ruth First in 1982 is revived as a result of
now knowing more about her ideals, ambitions, quirks and contradictions. A
similar anger and despair wells up with the description of the murder of Jake,
one of Hassim’s main characters. Sadness surges as Wieder describes Slovo
coming to terms with his unavoidable death as a result of cancer at the very
time when his intellectual and imagination was at its greatest.

But as I travelled both books’ pages they
surfaced and then resolved an issue that has puzzled me over a long time.

Our country is universally praised for having
faced down the past, for its Truth and Reconciliation. Yet those of us who live
here know it remains fragmented and vrot.
To First, Slovo or Suleiman it would seem inconceivable that those who
benefitted materially from the past could benefit most from the present
(although neither Joe nor Ruth would have made peace with it or wallowed in its
material fruits as some of their followers have). But more worrying to me is
why so many of those who live and luxuriate in the fruits of the democracy
continue to show so little empathy or interest in the lot of those whose lives
were blighted by Apartheid.

Why? Why? Why?

The answer lies in these books. It is found
in the idea of identity.

At Slovo’s funeral the then Chief Rabbi,
Cyril Harris, attributed Joe’s political commitment partly to his
“humanitarianism” which, he said, “springs from
a deep sense of identification with the oppressed, the ability to hear their
cry, an acute awareness of the realities of poverty, a personal anguish at the
suffering of fellow human beings.”

Those words ring true. They contain a
universal truth. South Africa might have gone through a process of truth and
reconciliation, but without identifying with the lives that were destroyed it
seems impossible for those who directly benefited from their destruction (as
most white people did) to feel empathy or solidarity.

Both books make “identification” possible by
bringing the adversity and nobility in life to life.

At Slovo’s memorial parts of his favourite
symphonies from Beethoven and Mahler were played.

Towards the end of Hassim’s
book, the main characters reflect on life of ‘Jake’ Yacoob Suleiman, murdered
by the security police, and recall what they were taught from sections of
Tennyson’s grand poem Ulysses. When
Hassim’s character quips: “But you can’t make a bullet proof vest out of
Tennyson’s poems” you can almost see Slovo nodding in agreement.

As we go into our 20th year of
freedom, those people who were on the safe side of the Apartheid fence would do
well to try and understand how devastating Apartheid was for the lives of
people on the dark side. These two great books can help you get there. That is
why they should not just be set texts for school and university students, but
for all citizens of the new South Africa.

The Lotus People by Aziz Hassim
is published by STE Publishers.Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the
War Against Apartheid by Alan Wieder is published by Jacana.